The Third Wheel

The term is less satisfying as a description of the substance of the plays. And I’ve often wondered whether Pinter’s plays are nourishing beyond the fascination they provide. Do they do more than play on modern audiences’ fear of a world that appears, despite its advances, increasingly elusive and hostile?

After seeing a preview of the Roundabout Theatre’s Caretaker, I’ve decided that at least one of them does. In contrast with most of Pinter’s pre-Betrayal output, The Caretaker holds out a belief in the possibility of human relationships that transcend power and dependency. Though fainter, it’s the same conviction that brings a golden glow to Chekhov’s otherwise melancholy universe.

First, a counter-example: In The Homecoming (considered the most prototypical of Pinter’s plays), a working-class household consisting of an elderly man, two of his sons, and an “uncle” are visited by another son, a professor at an American university. The professor brings his wife with him. The house the ex-patriots visit is run chaotically, with power continually shifting to whichever of its mostly volatile males best intimidates the others at any given time. Initially hesitant and afraid, the professor’s wife gradually brings an end to the chaos by embracing the savagery of her new surroundings. She voluntarily disowns her husband (and two children back home) to become a whore-servant to her in-laws. By dispensing a calming, sensual femininity on her own terms to a household that, through death and sexual haplessness, could not replace it otherwise, she at play’s end has effectively assumed all power for herself. The final scene depicts the beefy younger son with his head leaning submissively on her knee, the other son gazing on from a distance, and the father pleading impotently that she share the wealth a little. (The ex-patriot son has left.) A coldly Nietzschean logic has played itself out, whereby power is the sum end of human interaction and bridge-burning self-reinvention is the key.

The Caretaker left me with a very different feeling. It proceeds similarly, with a wary protagonist being led into a strange environment. This time, it’s a homeless man (Davies) being brought by a mildly mentally ill man (Aston) into his modest flat. Davies is unsure why he’s been invited there, and is even more confused when offered a bed and keys to the room. While Aston does set occasional boundaries, they fade beside the voluntary lengths he goes to on his guest’s behalf—running errands for him, bringing him shoes, giving him a few bob for tea. Aston in time offers his guest permanent accommodation in exchange for light caretaking. By this point, it has become clear that Aston’s generosity has no ulterior motive. And a moment unique to Pinter has occurred, where a character’s inexplicable behavior appears to have nothing but benevolence behind it. Davies declines to accept the caretaker position outright, but neither does he seem inclined to leave. He makes repeated Godot-like references to Sidcup, a place to which he needs to travel in order to collect his “papers” and thus get “sorted out,” but the trip never happens. A long-term relationship based on the equal terms of give-and-take is thus passed over, and a tenuous one of benefactor / receiver remains in its place.

The play’s requisite element of menace is provided by Aston’s brother Mick, who claims to own the flat and drops in on Davies while the latter is alone. Mick’s behavior swings psychopathically from extraverted sociability to explosive brutality. The dominance Mick is able to wield from both frightens Davies at first. But Davies also finds it alluring, and he finds himself accepting from Mick the same offer of caretaking that he refused from his brother. It is disturbingly unclear whether Mick is ever being sincere or merely gaming, but Davies’ head swells nonetheless with the sense that he’s aligned himself with someone powerful. So when Aston confronts him about the noise he makes at night, Davies becomes flippant and belittling, then goes so far as to make additional demands on his host.

By the final scene, Mick’s offer has been abruptly withdrawn and Aston has asked Davies to leave. In those last moments of the play, I experienced something more than the captivated creeped-outness I usually get from a Pinter play. I could see in gnarled, troll-postured Patrick Stewart the remorse of rejected opportunity, of happiness discarded in pursuit of the popular, the thrilling, the instantly gratifying. It’s a moment I recognized all too well and a moral universe I can relate to. I didn’t know the younger Pinter was capable.